Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature. The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

History repeats itself. One should indeed go back 200 years to learn about the banning of abolitionist literature, but don't forget that it was only 9 years ago on January 10, 2012 when the Tucson Unified School District Board dismantled the Mexican American Studies program, banning not just courses, but also books as I've posted on this blog, e.g., The Banned Books List for Arizona Ethnic Studies (search "banned books" on this blog for more information).

I researched the impact of Arizona on the Mexican American Studies advocacy community here in Texas—of which I am a part—and found that what happened in Arizona surrounding Mexican American Studies is what inspired us in 2013 to organize what is today the contemporary Ethnic Studies Movement in Texas. I predict that this conservative movement—under the banner of "Critical Race Theory"—will ultimately fail as have all previous attempts.

The main difference today from years and decades past is greater awareness of our country's possessive investment in its racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic ways of knowing and being that underlie the violence we've witnessed against dark-skinned people for much too long. We undoubtedly share a common humanity such that these dispositions are simply neither desirable nor sustainable. 

What the larger advocacy community must learn from all of this, as well, is the interconnectedness of these struggles in order to build unity and a shared sense of purpose for collective action. Many of us are having this very conversation right now here in Texas.

Así es...and there is no better time than now to advocate for a good and just education that disavows hostile, domineering, and dehumanizing ways of knowing and being in the world.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature.

The common denominator? Fear of Black liberation.

ANTHONY CONWRIGHTSEPTEMBER+OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE

by Anthony Conwright | Sept.-Oct. 2021 | Mother Jones

There have been many contributions to help make sense of the Republican obsession with critical race theory, a framework developed some 40 years ago to analyze the ways racism is endemic to our laws and policies. Conservatives have decided it’s a domestic threat, and, as of this writing, 11 states have already banned teaching it in public schools. But perhaps the best explanation for the hysteria is in a journal entry written on April 7, 1829, by a schoolteacher named Susan Nye Hutchison, who lived in Augusta, Georgia, and whose diaries illuminate a quarter century of life before the Civil War. “Great fear begins to be prevalent that the negroes are about to rise,” Hutchison wrote.

Georgians had experienced a spate of fires, as rumors of insurrection made the citizens of Augusta both negro- and pyro-phobic. Four days before Hutchison’s entry, another “terrible fire” burned about a third of the city, according to a contemporary news article. Estimated damages totaled half a million dollars, with nearly 350 homes destroyed. Hysteria ensued, and enslaved Black people were blamed, rounded up, and tried without evidence.

Months later, a pamphlet named the Appeal, David Walker’s polemic against slavery, emerged in the South. “My object is, if possible,” Walker, a free Black man, wrote, “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness.”

Southern politicians viewed Walker’s Appeal and its repudiation of their values as “incendiary,” a pyrotechnic of another kind. When Walker’s treatise reached his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, magistrate James McKee issued a warning to Gov. John Owen:

The dissemination of Walker’s pamphlet…[proves] beyond a doubt that a systematic attempt is making by some reckless persons at the North to sow sedition among the slaves [of] the South, and that this pamphlet is intended and well calculated to prepare the minds of the slave population for any measure, however desperate, that they may propose for accomplishing their emancipation…unless some measures are taken to counteract this design in time, I fear the consequences may be serious to the extreme.

North Carolina quickly passed two laws aimed at stemming slave rebellions by repressing the spread of abolitionist literature. An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications made it a felony to import and distribute “any written or printed pamphlet or paper…the evident tendency whereof would be to excite insurrection, conspiracy or resistance.” A second law banned “the teaching of slaves to read and write,” saying it “has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion to the manifest injury of the citizens of this State.”

Walker’s Appeal also led to Georgia’s December 1829 anti-literacy law, which made circulating insurrectionary texts punishable by death. Virginia, Missouri, and others followed. As a Missouri state archive website puts it, the bans were deemed necessary because “an uneducated black population made white citizens feel more secure against both abolitionists and slave uprisings.”

“This is a terrorist assault in our country, and rioting cannot be tolerated,” Ted Cruz said last year as citizens rebelled against police murder. Republicans had little scripture to demonize protests against the public torture and execution of George Floyd, so they deferred their anti-rebellion rhetoric into new laws against looting, property damage, and even protesting, suggesting that failing to do so would bring a conflagration that would consume the country. “These people are violent, domestic extremists,” Marco Rubio said. “They hate the police, they hate the government, and they want this country to fall apart…some of them want a second civil war.”

Anti-protest bills were an opening salvo against the Black Lives Matter rebellions, but there would be another volley. As demonstrators and their allies picked up How to Be an Antiracist, White Fragility, and other books—which helped them articulate demands to dismantle white supremacy, to rebel against state-sanctioned murder, to call for defunding police and obliterating qualified immunity—Republicans turned to locking down these texts and the ideas they carry.

From 2012 to 2019, critical race theory was mentioned on Fox News only four times. From June 2020 to May 2021, it was mentioned in 150 broadcasts. By July, it was 250 times a week. Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who started banging the CRT drum on the network, was quite frank about how and why he’d engineered the upward trend. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans,” he tweeted in March.

In attacking the things they’ve labeled as critical race theory, Republicans are seeking to erase the entire contemporary genre of abolitionist oratory. Critical race theory, diversity training, anti-­racism, DEI, discussions of white fragility, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her New York Times 1619 Project—to them, it’s all interchangeable jargon in the Black Lives Matter anthem, seditious lyrics that prelude uprisings against the proper order of things. This campaign to annihilate anti-­racist speech is not only the ideological offspring of the laws banning abolition literature; it’s a ruse to veil their hatred and fear of Black Lives Matter rebellions.

Literacy among enslaved Africans was not always antithetical to slavery in the colonies. It was once permissible for the enslaved to read Bibles, but when colonists realized the skill could be a gateway to liberation, literacy was outlawed. The first anti-literacy legislation in the colonies was in the wake of South Carolina’s 1739 Stono Rebellion, led by the purportedly literate slave Jemmy and resulting in the death of some 25 white people, as many as 50 Black people, and the burning of at least six plantations. Afterward, the colony passed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in This Province. The law contained a bevy of provisions to keep enslaved Africans in “subjection and obedience,” essentially ending manumission and prohibiting them from writing or growing their own food.

The fear of insurrection and rebellion—and the spread of thoughts and words that might fuel them—persists today. “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other. It is state-sanctioned racism and has no place in Florida schools,” said Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. A bill he signed into law forbids teaching “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” It also says educators “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The text echoes an op-ed article published in the Richmond Enquirer in 1856:

Every school and college in the South should teach that slave society is the common, natural, rightful and normal state of society. Any doctrine short of this contains abolition in the germ: for, if it be not the rightful and natural form of society, it cannot last, and we should prepare for its gradual but ultimate abolition…To teach such doctrines we must have Southern teachers and Southern school books. It is from the school that public opinion proceeds, and the schools should be set right. No teacher should be employed in a private family or public school at the South, who is not ready to teach these doctrines. Parents, trustees and visitors should look to this thing.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon shared this prophecy on his podcast in May. “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” That fight played out mercilessly at the University of North Carolina, where the conservative-­controlled board of trustees’ unprecedented obstructions to hiring Hannah-Jones caused her to walk away from a prestigious position on the journalism faculty.

Locally, parents have taken heed, turning school board hearings into tribunals to eradicate anti-racism. Elana Yaron Fishbein, founder of No Left Turn in Education, a grassroots movement against critical race theory, claimed in a letter to her district’s superintendent that such curricula “plan to indoctrinate the children into the ‘woke’ culture.”

So happy to read these news about the ground that Ethnic Studies is gaining throughout the country.  This despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric and the racial and ethnic bias we still face as a country even if it's getting more attention from the news media—and as noted squarely at the Oscars this weekend, too.  

We ourselves here in Austin had a first-ever Ethnic Studies summit last Friday evening that brought together UT Ethnic Studies students and faculty with AISD school district staff, teachers, and high school students to talk about the first year of the roll out.  Currently taught in 8 high schools, AISD is the first district in the state of Texas to implement Ethnic Studies to scale—and with plans to offer it next year at the high school level districtwide.  You can view the summit at this link since we recorded it live on Facebook.

 Clearly Ethnic Studies is making a massive difference in these students' lives along the very same lines as the encouraging news story below.  Thanks to my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Roberto Calderón, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

 

Historia Chicana

4 March 2018

Amid Anti-immigrant and Racial Clashes, Ethnic Studies Programs Blossom in Public Schools

By Tribune News Service on March 4, 2018 3:34 pm

As public debates swirl around “Dreamers,” President Donald Trump’s border wall and Black Lives Matter, the study of race and ethnicity is booming in public schools.

Nationwide, states and school systems are refining, expanding or adopting courses that explore history, literature and politics through the eyes of people who aren’t white. The programs, which until recently were banned in Arizona and derided as anti-American, are thriving in unexpected places. Some districts are making ethnic studies compulsory — for whites as well as minorities.

Teacher Jr Arimboanga shows his ethnic studies students a video about racism at John O’Connell High School in San Francisco on Jan. 22, 2018. (Josh Edelson/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

“In our current political context, especially with the president, there has been a huge gain in the critical study of race and ethnicity, and the desire for students to see themselves reflected in what they are learning,” said Julia Jordan-Zachery, a professor at Providence College in Rhode Island and president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. “The interest predates Trump, but it’s only growing now. It’s a way of flipping the script on what teaching is traditionally supposed to be.”

It’s a profound shift from just seven years ago, when the closing of a Mexican-American studies program in Tucson caused a national uproar.

Last May, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb — who took over the job from Mike Pence, now the vice president — signed a law requiring every high school to offer an ethnic or racial studies elective each year. The move came after years of failed attempts to get similar laws on the books. What changed?

Republicans teamed up with Democrats and called for classes to be electives instead of requirements. Students need the “opportunity to take a class that relates to their experiences and heritage,” the bill’s co-sponsor, Republican state Rep. Robert Behning, said at the time.

Indiana leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People launched an aggressive lobbying effort, spurred in part by police shootings of unarmed black Americans.

In June, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill requiring ethnic studies for all public school students between kindergarten and 12th grade. As in Indiana, racial minority groups — emboldened in part by a number of hate crimes in one of the country’s whitest states — were behind the change.

The law compels Oregon educators to look at where they fail “to recognize the histories, contributions and perspectives of ethnic minorities and social minorities.” It includes women, the disabled, refugees, immigrants and LGBT people among “social minorities.”

Also last June, the Seattle school board said it would weave ethnic studies into its schools’ curriculums after coming under NAACP pressure.

While previous campaigns to establish ethnic studies programs around the U.S. targeted minority groups, the Seattle NAACP made a different case, asserting on its website, “Ethnic studies courses benefit white students, who disproportionately have the privilege to be unaware of the realities of racism.” The argument was similar in the mostly black and Latino city of Bridgeport, Conn., where last October school administrators decided to require students to take a half-year class on African-American studies, Caribbean/Latin American studies or a course on race to graduate.

“Even in places where it hasn’t fully blossomed, there are steps being taken to incorporate ethnic studies,” Jordan-Zachery said. That includes Kansas and Texas, where legislators are pushing measures that would institute Mexican-American studies classes and those on other ethnic groups.

“For much of the history of education in the U.S., we have been deleted and erased in textbooks,” said Georgina C. Perez, a Latina Democrat on the Texas state Board of Education. Through ethnic studies, she said, “we’re reclaiming our history.”

States and cities are following California, where education officials are standardizing what’s taught in ethnic studies classes after highly touted programs in San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Ethnic studies grew out of the civil rights and anti-colonial movements of the 1960s. San Francisco State University was a pioneer, with its College of Ethnic Studies that launched in 1968. UC Berkeley opened an ethnic studies department a year later. In 1994, Berkeley High School became one of the first public high schools to offer ethnic studies.

A key for many programs is their reading lists. At Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary School in St. Paul, Minn., kids in an African-American studies class read “Desmond and the Very Mean Word,” a story based on the childhood of future Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa.

At John O’Connell High School in San Francisco, ninth-grade ethnic studies students look at how news and entertainment media portray minorities, and they read from the autobiography of black nationalist Assata Shakur and the Eddie Huang memoir on his experience as an Asian-American, “Fresh off the Boat.”

In Sarah Rodriguez’s ethnic studies class at Santa Monica High School, a recent lesson revolved around students discussing activism against gentrification in Boyle Heights, where art galleries and coffee shops have attracted white and more well-off newcomers in the traditionally Mexican-American, working-class neighborhood.

Activists celebrated last year after an arts nonprofit called PSSST shut down amid criticism that it was helping to displace locals.

Rodriguez told the 17 students — a mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors — to discuss a Boyle Heights blog that suggested gentrification counted as a form of racist state violence.

She asked students if they agreed that the transformation of a neighborhood, often fueled by government policies that cater to business interests, could be described that way. Some said yes. Some said the answer wasn’t so simple, especially after they watched a documentary about a Latina artist who praised the arrival of galleries and said the neighborhood was now safer than when she grew up there.

“The class really challenges you to think about your identity yourself,” said Diana Hernandez, a Mexican-American sophomore. “It helps us make more sense of what we’re learning throughout the school day.”

Nationally, supporters of ethnic studies say they lead to better grades and graduation rates. They often cite a 2016 Stanford University study assessing the San Francisco Unified School District’s ethnic studies program when it was a pilot, from 2010 to 2014. The study found that students who took ethnic studies courses, including many who came from lower-income families, performed better overall than other students.

Ethnic studies students’ attendance rates were 21 percentage points higher, they earned more points toward graduation and their grade-point averages rose by 1.4 points. Students made the biggest gains in science and math, and boys and Latino students made the greatest improvements.

Jr Arimboanga, an ethnic studies teacher at John O’Connell High, one of the schools in the San Francisco study, said confidence and study skills have increased among students who have taken the classes.

“When you look at traditional world history that many of our students take, the textbook is the dominant narrative,” Arimboanga said. “It focuses on a Eurocentric experience. People of color are mentioned in negative or simplified ways. The African-American experience only starts with slavery and forgets the previous rich history in Africa. Latinos and Mexican-American students often have a paragraph around the Mexican-American War, but don’t read about the native experience of Latinx peoples before colonialism.”

His syllabus includes a screening of “Precious Knowledge,” a PBS documentary about the fight for Mexican-American studies in Tucson.

The school district shut down the program in 2012 after state officials threatened to withhold more than $14 million for violating a newly passed law banning courses tailored for a particular ethnic group or that were deemed to fuel anti-American sentiment.

Then-Arizona Superintendent of Education John Huppenthal said a Tucson class he observed — where a Che Guevara image hung on a wall and he said a lecture described Benjamin Franklin as racist — seemed anti-white. Kids “understood the framework that was being laid out — that Hispanics are the oppressed and Caucasians are the oppressors. That’s very troubling,” he told The Times at the time.

In response, the district introduced a program for “culturally relevant” teaching that didn’t run afoul of the law but still allowed classes on government and history with Mexican-American and African American perspectives.

In August, a federal judge in Phoenix declared the ban on ethnic studies unconstitutional, saying it violated Latino students’ First Amendment “right to receive information and ideas.”

In December the same judge banned Arizona from enforcing the law, and cited Huppenthal’s crusade against the courses.

Ethnic studies supporters hailed the decision, hoping it would spur the growth of such programs across the U.S.

But in Arizona, the subject remains touchy. State education officials said they want to preserve elements of the ban. Trustees of the Tucson Unified School District, although given the green light by the federal judge, held off on resuming Mexican-American studies courses in January.

“While it’s growing in California and elsewhere, it’s still a controversial issue here,” said school board member Kristel Foster, who sponsored the proposal to once again allow Mexican-American studies. “Every election here people still ask about Mexican-American studies. The ban is gone, and things have moved in many places nationally, but it’s still having an effect here.”

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Historia Chicana

Mexican American Studies

University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

TUSD board does not vote to re-integrate Mexican American Studies

Mexican American Studies in TUSD did experience a set back as one might expect with the political and legal battle that was finally resolved last fall.  It is sadly predictable to see that now there's foot-dragging, despite the court ruling.  Can't help but think about how this mirrors what's going on in Texas right now with our State Board of Education.  

See my earlier post on this here.  Folks seriously have to either run good candidates for school board or State Board, as the case may be, or they have to run for office themselves.

-Angela 

TUSD board does not vote to re-integrate Mexican American Studies

Wednesday, January 31st 2018, 12:27 am CST by Evan Schreiber

Updated: 

Wednesday, January 31st 2018, 3:18 pm CST

TUSD takes up Mexican-American studies

TUCSON, AZ (Tucson News Now) - By introducing a substitute motion the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) governing board did not vote to re-integrate the Mexican American Studies program back into the district, as it was written in the agenda.

The agenda item had been introduced by board members Adelita Grijalva and Kristel Ann Foster and was put on hold during the Jan. 16 meeting. 

Foster called it an "olive branch" to let teachers know that they had the support of the board and a way to remove the hardship educators endured during the ban.

Educators echoed that sentiment.

"The teachers that are teaching these courses need to feel that they can teach these courses and not be slapped on the wrist," said Cam Juarez, a Culturally Relevant Curriculum (CRC) board advisor, during the public comment section.

The controversial Mexican American Studies (MAS) program was controversially banned in 2010 and remained so until August 2017, when a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional.

On Tuesday night, Jan. 30, following an informational session presented by CRC education leaders regarding the current status of the courses, including a closer look at the 83 TUSD high school CRC course sections currently being offered, board member Rachael Sedgwick introduced a substitute motion. 

Sedgwick's motion, seconded by board president Mark Stegeman, passed 3-1, with Foster abstaining and Grijalva the dissenting vote. Thus, it nullified Foster's and Grijalva's original agenda item.

Discussion on the original item lasted an hour as board members went back and forth. Grijalva said the goal was not to be controversial or divisive, but a message of support to the teachers.

"To have a conversation about if there's any success that can be made in order to reach these students in any other capacity, anything that we haven't done, then go do it. Go do it because this law is not around to stop us," she said.

Legal action against the ban had already been resolved, thanks to the 2017 ruling.  However, five months later, the board had yet to address exactly how they would bring the curriculum back.

"I cannot as a representative of community members say yes or no to this. I would much rather, that's correct, avoid the conversation, yeah," Sedgwick said, stating that the federal court order was clear and that the Foster/Grijalva item was "redundant."

In principle, Sedgwick's motion stated that the board would continue to maintain the status quo, now that the ban has been lifted. It would put the responsibility of a plan to move forward with the curriculum in the hands of those CRC educators.

Her motion stated that they understand there is a CRC department committed to those courses and has successfully been implementing them. 

As far as a plan to move forward, the motion stated that the board is asking CRC directors to bring forward any curriculum changes through the standard revision process that has existed all along.

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